27 January 2013
This is a fun video, and at first blush seems pretty accurate.
ObQuibble: I question the use of the year 450 as the benchmark for Old English. That’s about the time the first Anglo-Saxons were landing in England. Most of our evidence for the language comes from several centuries later. The earliest texts of any length we have are from the eighth century. And virtually all the poetry that survives was copied down in the tenth or eleventh centuries. So it’s not really a thousand-year jump from Old English to Chaucer in the late fourteenth. It’s more like 500–700 years.
